FUDCon Lawrence 2013 - Day 1

It's that time of year again - FUDCon time! I wish that I had a little more time
to get stuff ready after Fedora 18 was released but there's not much I can do
about it at the moment.

Today started as most FUDCons do - with a rundown of how BarCamp works, voting
and a "State of Fedora" talk by our fearless FPL, Robyn.

The talks today were interesting and not quite as bunched up as Blacksburg last
year - I remember having time slots in which I wanted to attend all of the presentations
but also having time slots where there weren't any particular presentations that
I was excited about.

I learned a bit more about HyperKitty
and the role it plays in the upcoming MailMan 3.0.
I'll be interested to see the kinds of back end indexing and statistics that'll
be available after release - especially some of the stuff about conversation
filtering by type (question, flame war, debate etc.).

The other two talks that I found most interesting were Spot's talk about the idea
of turning Fedora into more of a release-based distribution (doing major changes
in chunks of 20.0, 20.1, 20.2 etc. instead of trying to get a lot of major, not
quite related changes done between 20, 21 and 22). It would be a big change to
Fedora and while I do have some concerns about the details, I am intrigued overall.

What surprised me is how useful my talk on the blocker/nth process was to me. I
expected it to be mostly describing the various complexities of blocker proposal
but it ended up yielding quite a bit of good information from the Anaconda devs
and one person who wasn't already familiar with the blocker/nth process.

The anaconda devs had several good points about some of the weaknesses in our
processes and suggestions on some of their pain points that the pain points
that they see as more of a distro-wide problem

While describing the process of proposing new blocker bugs to the newer person,
the craziness became a bit more apparent to the point where it's probably time
to discuss what we want to do with the blocker process in the long run.

We need to change the name and alias for 'NTH' bugs - it's confusing and
just makes the process overall more complicated than it really needs to be.
One suggestion was to change it to 'freeze break' so that 'F19Alpha-accepted'
would become 'F19Alpha-freezebreak' and 'F19Alpha-freezebreak-accepted' but
that'll need to be proposed on the Test list before anything actually changes.

Outside of the talks, I spoke a bit with lmr
about what autotest can do and what we want to
do in the future for AutoQA. I still
don't have any really good ideas but that's a good chunk of what I want to get
done over the rest of the weekend; solidify the requirements we have for Fedora
test automation. If I can get a better handle on that and come up with a more
concrete idea of what I'd like to see happen to the blocker bug tracking process,
I'll be really happy with what got done over the weekend.

The rest of tonight will be playing games and socializing on top of the discussions
I've mentioned above. I want to get the automation and tools things figured out
but some fun is good for the soul :)